Friday, November 28, 2003

Light Grey Friday

Once more we are in Fernadina Beach, established in our favorite B&B. We went out to do our Christmas shopping, but unusually did not find the usual over abundance of things we wanted. Oh, we managed a few things, but usually the Friday after Thanksgiving is a glutton's paradise of shopping. All the stores here do a "Pajama sale" -- if you wear your pajamas to the store, you get some manner of discount. In years past, the pajama clad were highly entertaining, crowding around and through the main street, showing off sleepy-time finery. This year things were sparse. I'm sure the store owners felt it. It was also warm and humid -- the heat before the front as clouds piled grey in the sky. By 2 pm it was blowing and by 3 it was raining steadily. We retreated to our room and our computers and books to wait out the weather. By 6 pm there was a definate drop in temperature and now it's actually chilly. Well, for delicate Floridians, it's chilly. I'm sure there are snowbirds from Ottowa running around in bikinis somewhere.

I didn't even glut on books as I usually do, because while they have two decent bookstores here (one preferable to the other for being more about books and less about strategic and artful arrangement of bestsellers), I didn't find the Dylan Thomas collection that I am suddenly desiring. I picked up an encyclopedic book on cat breeds (just can't know too much about the alien creatures who run my life) and an interesting volume called "Dragons, Unicorns, and Sea Serpents: A Classic Study of Evidence for their Existance" by Charles Gould, originally published in 1886. Oh, and I plowed through yet another Georgette Heyer book I picked up at Borders. I read it so fast that I didn't even bother sticking it up in my list. And I still have those four books waiting on me. It's pitiful how little I've felt like reading anything other than my current collection of webjournalers. And I've only felt like writing such things as what appears here.

I may be picking up some additional work soon, helping R in her bookstore and perhaps helping her husband with some real estate related web stuff (I can post pictures with the best of them, after all!) which will perhaps have the effect of squeezing my overabundant free time so that once more I will be wound in the agonized grip of Too Busy To Write. I've have nearly two years now of Lots Of Free Time and not a damn worthwhile thing have I been doing with it. On the other hand, I seem to spend a lot less time being sick, being stressed out, being twisted with painful hips and shoulders, but I spend just as much time whining about things and pondering the pointlessness of my life. Perhaps introducing a little more activity outside my beloved house will be good for me.

The idea of surgery to get pregnant is getting more and more daunting. It's coming up for decision time and I just don't know if I can do it. Well, no, I don't know if I can recover sufficiently to survive a pregnancy and then be in any shape to care for a baby. I can do the surgery, yeah, if I don't go back through the mental clouds and darkness and holding a knife against my forearm wondering if not being alive will feel better than being alive and watching blood running into the groove at the base of my palm when the doorbell rings. I've been close, but something -- inside or outside or both -- keeps saying "what you don't get through this time you have to do over, so why waste time?" There's a lot to be said for having faith in your beliefs, no matter how nutty or misguided or out-and-out wrong someone else claims them to be.

But I really, really have problems with the thought of being cut open again -- no, of being put into the chemical sleep that my brain seems to so much resent that it punishes me for months and months afterwards. Even now, so many years later, I know things have changed. My concentration is less. My ability to retain focus is strained constantly. I don't engage emotionally like I once did. Some parts are good -- while anger was so long my energy, it was also the destructive whirlwind, the inexplicable personal hurricane that swept through everything I had and threw it all over, what I wanted and what I didn't want. While I miss the anger, I miss it the way you miss something that was exhilarating yet terribly troublesome -- with a pang, but with no desire to have it back again.

Baker, Baker
Baking a cake
make me a day
make me whole again
and I wonder
what's in a day
what's in your cake this time